[While there was nothing necessarily wrong with the posts here per se, I felt an undertone of someone who enjoys the bureaucracy. Someone who idolises, who hugs the rulebook. I'm glad to say that I don't recall seeing a forum post like that on this forum. Do prove me wrong on this if you can. Also, the quote seems to derive a sort of humour from the situation, which seems unfortunate.]
Keyloggers - Announcements and Site News - AutoIt Forumshttps://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topi ... eyloggers/

The poster is now enjoying a short holiday - and the same fate awaits anyone else who posts similar code in future.

A problem happens, an inquiry, 'lessons learned', more bureaucracy, the bureaucracy solves nothing, it is ineffective and acts only as a time burden, a problem happens ...

I don't think a full-scale review of procedures will help anything. What you do is you collect a small but concrete list of case studies, and reflect on them, and use them to help guide you in dealing with tricky grey-area situations in future.

Are we rewriting the rules, or changing how they are enforced?

It's fine to have a list of rules, to indicate to people the kind of things that may be frowned upon by the forum, in case they didn't know. And it's a relatively short and well-structured, well-presented document. But what you don't want is people feeling forced to be more heavy-handed than their instincts inform them, because they have been misguided into feeling they have to. Or feeling forced to act too quickly. If the forum is a bit soft or slow in dealing with a problem, by hours, days or weeks, this is fine, and to be expected.

It's scary reading those AutoIt forum posts. It's exactly the bureaucratic, find excuses to stop anything real from ever getting done, it's better to have no software than undocumented software, attitude, that drove me to AutoHotkey in the first place.

If you think that our behavior will change a lot then you are simply wrong.
It's not like there have never been rules before - we just never publically announced them.
The only thing that is going to change rule-wise is that we disallow the sharing of cheat scripts.

There needs to be 2 polls [1 for 1 against] otherwise we can't tell how votes actually look.

nnnik wrote:If you think that our behavior will change a lot then you are simply wrong.

I wasn't implying this [no disrespect meant], but that changing the rules to disallowed cheat scripts would create a lot of grey areas and turn every script that could be used in a game into a landmine. [turning posting scripts into a minefield]
This would effectively kill the gaming sub-sections of the forum.

I feel like I’ve played a big part in causing this whole anti-cheating thing, but I feel like I still have a right to voice my opinion, right?
I agree with what Blackholyman said. Scripts that are considered “cheats” should be allowed. Here are my thoughts on why:
-There are so many other scripts that could be considered cheats, even if they normally aren’t seen as so.
-Users shouldn’t be punished for creating a unique way to use AutoHotkey.
-Why discourage users from coming to the forums because a few people don’t like the idea of cheating?
-While the script I posted did do some interesting things in an online video game, the primary purpose was not to make a perfect cheat for people to use (if it was I would have done it in a different language like C++), my main intention was to show what could really be done in AutoHotkey, since a lot of cheat providers look at AutoHotkey as bad, and I wanted to show a proof to them and others that AutoHotkey can be used to do crazy things, such as automatically aim at enemies while being completely undetectable, in my case.

As for the some of the other issues on the poll,
-Hacks and other “malicious” scripts should be allowed as well, as long as they do what they say they do.
-Open source issue: all scripts should have the right to be compiled as to protect the source code if the author wants it to be protected. If a script is decompiled and it turns out to be a malicious program not as it was said to be THEN administrative action should be taken.
Hacks/“malicious” scripts should be open source OR compiled with previous approval by an administrator. This way the source code can be protected, but at the same time users using the script are not at risk.

I don't want to get too deep into the whole cheaters thing, but as a gamer, I hate running into (obvious) cheaters (which typically AHK scripts don't purport themselves to do, like invisible or run through walls). They sour my experience. They derive any of their happiness by actively making other people miserable. We can debate that in PM if you'd like so as to not derail the topic. I'd rather they quarantine themselves in their own cheaters forum ran by one of the cheaters themselves, possibly with a password database storing plaintext passwords, and with malicious users who are trying to get cheaters to download trojans.

Which leads to the next point:

Open source issue: all scripts should have the right to be compiled as to protect the source code if the author wants it to be protected. If a script is decompiled and it turns out to be a malicious program not as it was said to be THEN administrative action should be taken.

Damage is done by the time a moderator gets around to testing the code, unless it's a first time poster whose post was not approved immediately. But that is a huge burden for a moderator to have to decompile the code and then check if it appears malicious, especially if they are unfamiliar with the game it's even trying to interact with.

Open source code can be malicious. If you post a script that's a couple thousand lines long, it's going to be hard to comb through that for legitimacy's purpose. But at least then the onus is not necessarily on the moderators to vet the code, but the user running it. And hopefully someone with knowledge of the game and of the code can spot something weird going on to bring it to a moderator's attention and get it removed.

Hacks/“malicious” scripts should be open source OR compiled with previous approval by an administrator. This way the source code can be protected, but at the same time users using the script are not at risk.

That's a decent compromise to make. I still don't think closed source should be with approval of an administrator, as if the mod/admin makes a mistake and approves a malicious code, again because of unfamiliarity with the game, that's not good. That's again where going to a forum dedicated to cheats for your particular game, or just a forum dedicated to cheats in general, is a better move. But if the mods are willing to look over the source code*, I'd hope they'd be conservative and only approve code that they are absolutely sure they know what is doing. I don't think that'll happen though, as they are all volunteers, and that's asking quite a lot.

*Mods may have to compile the code themselves anyhow, so they can be assured the creator didn't compile different code than what was approved. Or that they'd have to see the compiled file, decompile it, and verify that the user is sharing the same compiled file on the forums. That's quite a hassle. And also a risk at the mods, if they run a script that is malicious.

=====

One stance I think that would be wonderful as a "rule of thumb" is if sharing your third party program (AHK script) is not allowed on your game's developer's/publisher's official forums, it's probably not a program you should be running or sharing elsewhere. But that's all very subjective and requires familiarity with a game's EULA/TOS and how that forum is normally moderated. I wouldn't doubt there are some really friendly forums where the staff are more than happy to assist a disabled gamer with a third party script.

Exaskryz wrote:I don't want to get too deep into the whole cheaters thing, but as a gamer, I hate running into (obvious) cheaters (which typically AHK scripts don't purport themselves to do, like invisible or run through walls). They sour my experience. They derive any of their happiness by actively making other people miserable.

I don't see that being an issue imo, because having the code to a potential "hack/cheat" publicly visible makes it easier for the someone to patch or counter it with their anti-cheats. see below

Exaskryz wrote:Damage is done by the time a moderator gets around to testing the code, unless it's a first time poster whose post was not approved immediately. But that is a huge burden for a moderator to have to decompile the code and then check if it appears malicious, especially if they are unfamiliar with the game it's even trying to interact with.

I agree.

Exaskryz wrote:Open source code can be malicious. If you post a script that's a couple thousand lines long, it's going to be hard to comb through that for legitimacy's purpose. But at least then the onus is not necessarily on the moderators to vet the code, but the user running it. And hopefully someone with knowledge of the game and of the code can spot something weird going on to bring it to a moderator's attention and get it removed.

Burden should be on the user.

bluce wrote:all scripts should have the right to be compiled as to protect the source code if the author wants it to be protected.

Compiled scripts can already be easily extracted from binaries. I personally don't think compiled scripts should be disallowed altogether, only that the source is publicly visible in the post or a linked repository.OR
We could require a link to a file report from: virustotal and jotti, but I think this opens to door to fale positives/negatives.

Exaskryz wrote:One stance I think that would be wonderful as a "rule of thumb" is if sharing your third party program (AHK script) is not allowed on your game's developer's/publisher's official forums, it's probably not a program you should be running or sharing elsewhere. But that's all very subjective and requires familiarity with a game's EULA/TOS and how that forum is normally moderated. I wouldn't doubt there are some really friendly forums where the staff are more than happy to assist a disabled gamer with a third party script.

I would agree but then as you said this would move burden to the moderators, who could make a mistake.

just to point it out, people keep saying "a few people" don't want gaming stuff. If you search the forums, even the old forums, you'll see topics wanting a Gaming sub-section way back in like 2005, maybe older. Yes, that's not the same, but those people want gaming stuff separated because they don't like it, for the most part. So there is, and was, a lot of people against 'Gaming' topics in ahk (cheats, bots, macros, hacks).

for my opinions:
- "how to determine if a game is online": most games we get 'cheaters' (just to lump all terms together) for are popular, it'd be quite easy to tell ("csgo bhop". "cod no recoil" etc). Is a game both online and offline? well, just say "no, it has online". offline only? sure, allow it. online only? nope. generic script to modify (autofire, etc) many games? well, that can be for the rules / debate to decide.

- agree with Exaskryz's first paragraph. running into botters/idles/etc that's clearly obvious ruins games (go play rocket league. it's so fun going into 3 matches in a row where the other team is 2-3 idlers [sarcasm]). let cheats be on cheating sites, thats why people make them, they are the outcasts not allowed on many sites. let them post on a game ruining community of like-minded individuals.

- "police" ... we always had loose unspoken rules, but mostly it was the "wild west". most places on the internet have rules. it has bit us in the butt in the past because there was nothing explicitly saying "don't post/do/say this" so people did it despite being "common sense" (which also depends on country. like the n-word is a nono word in USA not so much elsewhere) not to. but they were not in the wrong doing a bad (for lack of a better word) thing because we had no where telling them not to do it. Just keep behaving as normal and you should be fine. If you/anyone does something mean/rude we can now point it out and do something without weeks of back-and-forth.

I think it's best to simplify that rule to being "Allow deletion only if nobody has replied after you" or "Only if your reply is the most recent may it be deleted".

A post may not be directly referenced by a quote or an @nnnik. It may be "As stated by someone above" or even less explicit and simply expanding on a topic casually mentioned by someone else. Or something I can totally see happening for an indirect acknowledgement: The first reply has a solution, then the second reply states "I wanted to show another way this can be done." If the first reply is deleted because they feel like the second reply was better, that disrupts the flow because you wouldn't expect the first reply to talk about "another way" since no alternative is available.

So even if you give the condition "... and refered to your posted in any way," it can be tricky to read finely enough to know if your post did get referenced.

just at this moment when looking in the "ask for help" forum and the "game" sub-forum a few stats are

from frist 20 topics of both normal ask for help and game subforum:

normal:
20 topics with
73 replys
with 1880 Views

Game:
20 topics with
65 replys
with 3354 Views

This was a way to little sample but still, it shows an amout of interesset, i'm not saying don't have rules on gameing stuff but i don't see cheats as an issue for the autohotkey comunity the way others do, I see it as one of the things that keeps us afloat... aka keeping new peeple comming in...

Perhaps we can better regard the rules as a forum ethos?
In reality, it won't be realistic to determine the intended use of a script. I used a lot of scripts in a PvE game, which should not be a problem (?), but the game introduced PvP, so it can be used to gain unfair advantage. Then again, even in single player games you can compete against others by means of high scores. Moreover, some gaming scripts contain interesting code which can be a valuable reference for other purposes.

I use a legitimate mouse disabling script to prevent my PC coming out of stand by due to sensor jitter, and a script to suppress certain notification windows, but it can easily be used to make computer illiterates think their mouse or PC is broken.
And practically, as mentioned before, do we want to spend time figuring out if a script is against EULA and whether it even has any validity?

The strictness of the AutoIt forum is undesirable imo; an arbitrary line of good-bad. I'm for an open policy, but I'm more concerned with the users that could be attracted in a 'anything goes' environment (especially immature gamers wanting a black box insta-win program). So I'd propose to allow any game interaction script, but discourage extensive, easy access cheat applications (and its users), by limiting one function per script and no configuration GUI.

- @derz00: I checked some posts, what appears to happen is that if your post is at the bottom, you can delete the post, otherwise you can't. I.e. you can delete a post if there are no posts below it in the thread.
- Similarly, you only see the 'Last edited by' text on a post if there are posts below it.
- There may be exceptions e.g. deletions/edits by mods.

[EDIT:] Now that I'm on this thread again, there should be a short number of guiding principles including:
- The golden rule. Bump, don't repost.
- Check if your post succeeded before submitting again. There should be a clear notification when new users successfully make their first posts, and/or they are told the posts are in a clearing stage waiting for mod approval. There could be an option to turn this on/off.
- Users should get notified every time something happens in one of their threads by default, with an option to turn this off. Regularly users say they were late responding because they expected a notification but didn't get one.
- Double-check things before you boldly assert things as definite facts. Otherwise use neutral or modifying language that indicates a degree of uncertainty.
- Don't invent syntax you know is wrong. Actually this isn't so bad, and sometimes it helps to explain the problem, or gives me ideas for new syntax suggestions or custom functions. [EDIT: The point I was trying to reach was this:] Sometimes people write pseudocode (that's fine/good), but that looks nothing like any code in any programming language ever, and then say something like: 'I ran that, but it didn't work'. Of course it didn't work.